FAQ

Who is Digitate?Digitate is a new venture of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). It was founded in 2015 as a wholly-owned entity under TCS to build next-generation products. Our first product is ignio™, a cognitive automation platform for enterprise IT. We are headquartered in Santa Clara, California and Pune, India.

What is ignio?ignio is a cognitive automation solution for IT Operations that prevents outages before they happen. ignio can rapidly identify root causes and automate routine tasks. It combines enterprise business context and pre-built knowledge about IT infrastructure technologies to enable better decision-making and ultimately solve many IT operations challenges.

What problems does ignio solve?The key use cases that ignio is designed to solve are:

Rapid root cause isolation: Instead of having to spend hours, or days finding a root cause, ignio can help IT identify problems in a matter of minutes. By characterizing both the topologies and behaviors of systems, ignio can identify anomalies and follow their effects upstream to get as close to the source as possible. This capability ensures the highest level of availability for all your mission-critical applications.

Automation of tasks: With ignio, IT admins no longer have to handle mundane, repetitive tasks. Automation reduces response times to get to resolutions faster and keep the basic systems running so that IT can focus on improving and expanding their infrastructures, not simply keeping them up.

Predictive impact analysis: It is sometimes difficult to determine the impact of a technology change in the IT environment, a process that can require weeks of modeling by experts. ignio helps remove ambiguities and provides clear results in a much shorter timeframe. For example, with batch processes, ignio can model all of the batch streams and simulate changes, identifying potential issues before they are implemented.

What are ignio’s key features?

Learn: ignio builds a multi-dimensional topology of your infrastructure resources and components along with their interdependencies. It then characterizes your environment by processing data from multiple diverse sources, allowing you to see across your entire enterprise and identify issues that would be impossible to ascertain from a single vantage point.

Resolve: With a view of your entire system, ignio automatically conducts root cause analysis to identify problem areas. ignio also performs simple tasks on your behalf and can function automatically to fix incidents without the need for explicit instructions. It doesn’t just work harder, but allows you to work smarter as well.ignio also correlates events by cause to eliminate issues that stem from the same issue, removing duplicate alerts that can tie up users and resources unnecessarily. By knowing your environment precisely, ignio is able to give you targeted feedback based on your specific business processes and needs.

Prevent: It is difficult to understand how changes made to the environment could have a negative impact on your business. Often this requires significant time with experts to model out the impact. Instead, using ignio, you can simulate these changes with high accuracy whereby giving you clear visibility on how to prevent unintended outages in a much shorter timeframe.

What is ignio Blueprinting?ignio’s Blueprinting capability uncovers the interdependencies among applications, business functions, and the infrastructure by creating a complete topological model that provides a real-time, 360-degree view of the entire IT environment. ignio takes data from a wide range of diverse sources to ensure that its view is as wide as it can be, and then structures and collates the data to provide a simple, comprehensible view of your enterprise. ignio automatically updates relevant system information when changes are made, allowing IT to operate with the most up-to-date intelligence, without manual intervention.

How does ignio’s Blueprinting deliver value?ignio uses Blueprinting to determine business context and relationships, providing the ability to prioritize and resolve IT incidents by identifying all components showing anomalous behavior. Knowing how your systems should work together narrows the root cause, helping IT identify the issue quickly and take corrective action. ignio automates execution of the steps required to fix the problem without requiring detailed or explicit instructions for each type of incident. Blueprinting allows organizations to focus on the issues and on planning changes, not simply keeping up with the changes themselves.

What is Normal Behavior Characterization?How does it relate to ignio’s self-learning capabilities?Normal Behavior Characterization identifies standard operational conditions by profiling metrics and identifying issues within an organization’s IT environment, across technologies and business units. ignio automatically characterizes the behavior of the environment, observing the way various systems interoperate and connect, and establishes a state of “normal,” which is a baseline founded on time of day, day of week, systems involved, and many other specific factors. By characterizing system changes, trends, dependencies, and influences, ignio can learn patterns that can be used to determine the health of the entire IT environment and identify any anomalies that may indicate underlying problems.

What is Anomaly Detection?Anomaly detection is an important capability that compares the current state with the expected “normal” state, uncovering IT anomalies such as service level agreement (SLA) violations, response time irregularities, availability problems and configuration changes. A major advantage of ignio is its ability to reduce tedious manual processes and substitute simpler, more effective ways to manage change.

How does ignio align with industry best-practice solutions?Is it proprietary? While the intelligence ignio provides is unique to Digitate, the underlying technologies and processes have been collected from many industry-leading sources. ignio aligns with industry best practices, including ITIL, and spans configuration management, event management, incident management, provisioning, request fulfillment, risk management, capacity/performance management, and more.In addition to incorporating the best of open source tools and knowledge, ignio features unique algorithms and methods, leveraging internal experience and engineering to provide a comprehensive solution. Digitate owns its software IP and has 25 patents pending, all helping to make ignio smarter, more responsive, and easier to manage.

Does ignio implementation require specialized or proprietary hardware?No. ignio is a software platform deployed on virtual machines with no need for specialized or proprietary hardware or interfaces.

What skills are needed to manage the ignio platform?While using ignio itself is straight-forward, we recommend the systems knowledge level of senior system admin. During the initial implementation and deployment, Digitate can work alongside your team to ensure that ignio’s capabilities are leveraged and customized in a timely manner, and, as the implementation progresses, guarantee that your own team can assume responsibility smoothly, across many levels of expertise.

Does ignio integrate with existing infrastructure?Yes. ignio is designed to integrate with existing IT enterprise infrastructure and applications. The ITSM- and ITOM-agnostic ignio cognitive platform is deployed on an organization’s existing instrumentation layer, providing value without requiring changes to systems already in place. ignio also integrates across a number of Enterprise Technologies and vendors, including Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, to provide complete end-to-end coverage without having to replace what already works for you.

Does ignio need to learn from scratch when deployed?Yes and No. Many of the advance features, including Blueprinting and Normal Behavior Characterization, require a minimum of 6-weeks’ time to learn about your environment so that ignio can provide the most accurate information for your specific business. That said, ignio also offers thousands of out-of-the-box functions, helping customers control costs and accelerate time-to-value as soon as it is deployed. By utilizing pre-defined functions and self-learning capabilities, together with hundreds of existing software connectors applicable to most of today’s modern infrastructures, ignio can quickly optimize and automate your IT operations environment. These pre-built facilities are available immediately, ensuring that you derive benefit from the start by speeding availability, agility, time-to-value, and ROI, while ignio works in the background to learn the particulars of your enterprise and build its longer-term context model.

Where can I learn more about pricing and/or licensing models?The Digitate team is available to discuss your company’s needs for optimizing IT operations. Email us at contact@digitate.com for more information.

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